SINCE the shock of the first murders signalling the start of the ‘rebellion’ (First Chimurenga in Matabeleland), the whites had fought with fury smouldering in their hearts, for the callous murder of many of their friends and family and acquaintances. (Tanser: 1997)

The word rebellion suggests revolt against legitimate authority. By what and whose authority were the British in the land of the Shona and the Ndebele? 

By authority of armed robbery, which is not legitimate authority except in the book of the armed robber. 

The Ndebele and the Shona were fighting the white menace, the foreign white armed invaders from across the seas, from the British Isles. 

It is this imperialist mentality that has caused unmitigated bloodshed and untold suffering across the globe. 

Our people would have none of it, they marshalled their forces and killed half the white population. 

In the First Chimurenga which broke out on March 24 1896 in Matabeleland, Marshall Hole reports that in March alone, 122 men, five women and three children were killed, while Courtney Selous puts it at 155 between March 24 and 30 1896. (Ranger:1967)

Why call these murders, when they were attacks in a war against armed robbers who had taken their land, made it theirs and settled on it with their families, relocated the owners of the land to infertile lands which were disease-ridden? The armed invaders looted cattle, small livestock and goldmines of the owners of this incredibly beautiful and rich land. 

Leander Starr Jameson had come to Matabeleland with an army of mercenaries on a mission to murder and loot. 

They took 100 percent of the only habitable land and 280 000 cattle leaving the Ndebele without a single cow, depriving them of their source of wealth, bride price, milk, meat and draught power, abandoning them to an impossible fate. 

As if this was not enough, they forcibly took young men to work on the stolen lands, forcing them to flee from their homes to escape this scourge. 

This was not a war of attrition but a just war to right a wrong, to reverse it. 

Our people had long told the whiteman in no uncertain terms that he was not wanted in the land of Chaminuka, in the land of Musikavanhu, and in the land of the Ndebele but they never listened, they believed in their guns and respected no God, no man. 

The Moffat Treaty as well as the Rudd Concession were massive frauds meant to rob the land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi which they coveted with insatiable greed.

White writers and others of the same mentality would talk of the killing of white people by Africans as murders, but not the killing of Africans by whites.  

The Ndebele and the Shona did not murder anyone, they fought and killed the foreign armed robber which is not a felony, it was a just act, to defend themselves, their people and their land. 

Throughout the First Chimurenga, the Ndebele did not kill the missionaries at Inyati Mission, the Shona did not kill the missionaries at Chishawasha. They were not murderers.

Tanser (above) would say whites fought with fury smouldering in their hearts. 

This assertion violates the mind and spirit, smouldering fury against whom? 

It is not logical to be furious when you are the armed robber who murdered and looted with impunity, how can your fury be justified? 

Unless of course you consider the one you injured to be a subhuman who has no right to self-defence, then you can argue a non-being has no right to fight in self-defence.

Selous describes three girls killed in the First Chimurenga in Matabeleland in tenderest tones, “the long hair of the young Dutch girls was still intact, and it is needless to say that these blood stained tresses awoke the most bitter wrath in the hearts of all who looked at them.” (Ranger: 1967). 

What about Frederick Courtney Selous, who, with four others, including Cecil John Rhodes, took ownership of the whole of Matabeleland South?  

How much did this deprive Ndebele children of their normal livelihood, no more milk, meat or sufficient grain? 

This same Selous would weep tender tears for Dutch girls? How many sweet little African girls were reduced to starvation and sickness because of the armed robbery of Ndebele land and wealth by him and his compatriots? 

How many sweet little African girls grew up without fathers, mothers, and brothers because of British armed robbery perpetrated so harshly and so cruelly?

The death of whites is couched in emotional tones, as touching and tragic. 

What about the hundreds of the Shona and Ndebele who were mowed down by the Maxim gun?

They are given just as a statistic, but they were mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, uncles, brides and bridegrooms, people with special lives and special people to them.

In their attack on Chief Makoni’s Gwindingwi fortress on August 3 1896, they were utterly ruthless, they pounded it with seven pounders, mountain guns, maxim guns, but the 4 000 Chimurenga warriors fought back fiercely. The invaders could not take the fortress. They pounded it thus despite that there were refugees within (Muchemwa: 2015). Sixty of Chief Makoni’s people were killed in the battle.

Tanser (1990) sings endless eulogies to the three privates who were killed in the contact. He describes them as ‘good and useful men whose loss we could ill afford.’ 

The three ‘had been buried in a well-chosen site, under two spreading trees’. But in actual fact these are murderers who were part of the armed force of robbers who attacked Chief Makoni who was ensconced in his fortress, his only crime was his determination to defend his heritage. 

Tanser does not give details of the 60 Africans killed in this battle of attrition, they are just a statistic, how many men, women, children? 

No-one talks of how their ‘ black-brown soft hair’ looked on their murdered corpses in the way the flowing hair of the Dutch girls moved Selous… this is not a matter for the white or white aligned pen or heart. 

They are just African corpses, nothing more. Africans have no feelings or if they do, they are irrelevant.

In the second attack on Chief Makoni’s Gwindingwi fortress which lasted eight days from August 25 to September 3 they pounded the fortress ceaselessly with wagon load after wagon load of dynamite from Mutare.

Thousands of innocent civilians were killed but thousands others escaped. These included Chief Makoni and other members of the royal family. 

At the end of the eight days Chief Makoni surrendered, he could see that if the siege continued his people would be wiped out. They held a kangaroo trial, convicted and murdered him on the same day. 

What anguish, the chief must have gone through, not just for himself or his immediate family but for his people he was now leaving at the mercy of the ruthless British armed robbers.

So who are the murderers? It is the British armed robbers who came to kill and maim in order to take what belongs to others, not the Africans who fought to defend their heritage!